Comment on Starmer warns apathy could keep Tories in power in pitch to disillusioned voters
thehatfox@lemmy.world 5 months agoThe problem is to tackle voter apathy, apathetic voters need to be given something to vote for, not just told to go the polls for the sake of it.
While I understand Starmer’s Labour’s desire to play it safe, at some point they have to nail their colours to something catching. Not being the other guy only goes so far, if there is concern about an unconvinced portion of the electorate not turning out there needs to be something to inspire them.
hellothere@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I agree, but under our stupid system it needs to be something that inspires a plurality of constituencies.
And that, unfortunately, means tory swing voters are more important for electoral success.
I live in an incredibly safe labour seat, so if they push a policy that gets 1k more votes here it’s pointless. If that same policy gets 1k here, and loses 1k in a target swing constituency, it’s actually bad.
We saw under Corbyn - who I voted for as leader twice - that in 2017 with an inspirational manifesto it will inspire people, but unfortunately those people literally lived in the wrong places. His support was too concentrated. In 2019, in a glorified brexit proxy vote, we saw that the public believed that Johnson could promise the earth, and that Corbyn couldn’t. Labour still had that, false, association with economic mismanagement.
Another way of framing this is that yes, some voter cohorts need to be inspired. But tory swing voters don’t need inspiration, they need to be reassured. They need to not be scared to vote Labour for possibly the first time in 20+ years. They need to know that their mortgage isn’t going to yet even higher, that Labour won’t “max out the country’s credit card”, and every other lie they’ve been fed by the Tories.